REVIEW: X-Men Days of Future Past – The Rogue Cut

A few weeks before San Diego Comic-Con 2015, Fox Entertainment announced that they’d be having an advance release of the BluRay copy of the extended version of X-Men: Days of Future Past during SDCC. Fans who purchased a copy will get to have a chance to screen it before it officially comes out. Luckily for me, I was able to attend SDCC and buy a copy of The Rogue Cut!

The screening happened on July 11, Saturday at the Reading Cinema in Gaslamp District of downtown San Diego near the Convention Center. There were three theatres and they were ALL fully packed with followers, fans and true believers of the X-Men film franchise.

Before the movie started, Director Brian Singer dropped by to say a few words about why he created the ‘Rogue Cut’. He mentioned that he wasn’t the type of director that would usually make a director’s cut or an extended version of a film; , Rogue was really supposed to be included when he originally created ‘X-Men Days of Future Past‘ but if every plot and sub-plot was included in the film, the movie would run for almost 3 hours!

Rogue Cut starts just like Days of Future Past with the future X-Men hiding in a underground bunker in Russia whilst being attacked by Future Sentinels. A scene in the underground bunker was added, which showed a collage of photos, presumably former team mates or fellow mutants who perished by Sentinel attacks. This gives emphasis to the fact that the future X-Men were really trying to save and rescue fellow mutants from the on-going Sentinel attacks. The same collage of photos was also added in the China scene where we see Warpath praying before meeting with the rest of the X-Men. In which follows the scene where a small debate happened between Xavier’s team and Bishop’s team, adding some speaking lines to most of the characters there (namely Warpath, Blink, Sunspot and Bishop).

They changed that story a bit in the latter part of the film where the scene which Xavier, Magneto and Iceman rescues Rogue, who is trapped inside Cerebro inside Xavier’s mansion, was turned into a prison laboratory base, run by humans and guarded by Sentinels.

There were even some scenes set in the 70’s, where young Xavier, Beast, Mystique and Magneto were in, that had some small details added like the scene where Xavier, Logan & Beast looks for Peter Maximoff at his home. There is a part of the movie where they show his younger sister was added, but what made it more interesting was a lot of fans were expecting her to be Wanda Maximoff aka The Scarlet Witch. Apparently that’s not the case, since there’s a short scene added where the mother mentions another sister in the house.

Another scene added in the 70’s setting was the romantic relationship between Beast and Mystique where it showed rekindling their sort-of relationship with each other during the previous film, X-Men: First Class, which made it interesting and made their relationship more detailed.

There were also some scenes in the film that would remind us of scenes from the previous X-Men films: one particular scene was that of Mystique destroying Cerebro, which what she did in the first X-Men film. Also another scene was where Magneto controlled the guns of the president’s bodyguards and pointed at them, which was also seen the in the first X-Men film.

This somewhat reminded us of two things, 1) it’s been 15 years since the movie franchise started and 2) the continuity of the films didn’t really stray away from the original. There is still that certain consistency even there are some changes that are already and will be happening. Especially with upcoming movies like X-Men: Apocalypse, Deadpool and even Wolverine 3, we can see the that Fox’s Marvel Universe has somewhat of a good foundation.

‘The Rogue Cut’ I can really say made the version of the movie more complete and more detailed. Making it as my Top 1 X-Men film so far (X-Men 3 & X-Men Origins: Wolverine still and will be on my bottom part of my list). I can also say that it’s good that the X-Men film team and Fox decided to make this version for the fans and followers of the film to really appreciate it more.

X-Men Days of Future Past – The Rogue Cut is out now available online and in your local video stores.